Balls and Hills and Skymaps oh my.

Artwork Works in Progress
1

Edit: Yes, I know I cut off the edge of the landscape with my skydome. I’ve fixed it in the latest render. Thanks folks.

This is a test of some of M@dcow’s skymaps. I’m using half of an icosphere as a skydome - the world settings weren’t giving me anything I wanted - major texture stretching an other unplesant effects. Any other suggestions? Also, any suggestions for getting convincing grass? I tried dupliverting patches of mesh grass all over the cursed hill, with very little success. (Though the initial test yielded quite convincing garden-gnome sized gravestones covering the landscape.) Oh! And my spheres have…um. Gosh. For lack of a better description, they seem to have sphincters. Look at the convergence point for all of the verticies, and you’ll see a bit of a wrinkle, which looks rather like this: * and is stuck onto the end of the sphere. What is the story with that?!

http://www.mereimagedesign.com/wiphills1.jpg
http://www.mereimagedesign.com/wiphills2.jpg
http://www.mereimagedesign.com/wiphills3.jpg
http://www.mereimagedesign.com/wiphills4.jpg

Thanks in advance, folks.

(God damned bus. I hate buses. I get to look foward to a seven hour ride on a Greyhound with nutcases. Last time a drunk guy fondled the girl sitting next to me.)

-Anogarlr.

2

try rendering these with ambient occlusion turned on and set to “sky texture”
this will color the ground properly

are your spheres nurbs?
I had a similar problem with a nurbs sphere and reflections

3

get some grass on the ground.

4

This looks like some of the stuff I used to do with POVRay, but without the weird media balls (Like a blender Halo, but more flexible and inside an object rather than being a point texture).
Sky Texture AO would be nice :D!

5

As I mentioned, I’m having trouble getting a good grass effect on the ground, or I’d have happily added grass. Again, any suggestions? I rendered a version using AO (sky tex) but, I believe due to my use of a skydome, it did not affect the render in the least, though it took quite some time to spit out (or at least relatively so).